Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: How's the internet tonight?

This is topic How's the internet tonight? in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 05-22-2004, 09:13 PM:

Anyone noticing any internet connection problems this evening (Saturday)? I seem to be unable to connect to AIM (or AOL via TCP/IP), Time, CNN and some others. Ebay connects but is often slower than the timeout. Amazon slow or not responding. F-T, Google, NYTimes, Yahoo, Yahoo Messenger and many others are fine; fast even.

This is via DSL. I suppose I should try a few dialup accounts and see if it's the same there.

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 05-22-2004, 09:20 PM:

Amazingly, all is OK and fast (1.2 mBits) here in and out of Hollywood tonight. SBC Global DSL.

>>> Phil

Posted by Rob Butler (Member # 2274) on 05-22-2004, 09:27 PM:

It's gotta be your connection, there's probibly just a lot of other people connected to your ISP that are all trying to get the same sites at the same time, notice how the more popular services such as AIM and CNN are having problems but not the less popular services which are doing better or fine. The ISP server can only handle so many connections to individual sites at once, and if the majority of the connections are going to the same servers (AIM, CNN, and eBay) those connections will slow down while the connections to other servers stay fine.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 05-22-2004, 09:41 PM:

The ISP server can only handle so many connections to individual sites at once

Um...no. If my provider was slow then all connections (other than to its own hosted sites) would be slow. The fact that I was connecting to a variety of sites around the country or world at decent speed suggests that my provider's connection to the backbone was okay. If others were able to connect to the mentioned sites without problem during that time that suggests the sites themselves weren't overwhelmed. But there could have been something between my ISP and those sites that was having problems. Connectivity to some of them was back briefly and then just as quickly went away. Popularity of the site is probably not a factor. If I knew some small sites on that corner of the net that seems disconnected from me then I'm sure they would seem down, too.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-22-2004, 11:49 PM:

It's gotta be the connection paths between you and whoever you are trying to connect to. The server doesn't connect straight to you, it goes through a lot of other BS before a connection is procured. Sounds like something somewhere is down and an alternate path is being forced (or something like that).

Everything is great for me.[av=k]

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 05-22-2004, 11:59 PM:

But everything is always great for you, Joe. You're just that kinda guy. [Razz]

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-23-2004, 12:09 AM:

You sicko! [av=o]

Posted by Joshua Waaland (Member # 287) on 05-23-2004, 12:42 AM:

Steve,

I had the same problem several days ago. I thought it was me at first. I tried running anti-virus programs, disabling anti-virus and firewalls, deleting cookies, temp files and history and even rebooted several times. I could not reach hotmail or ebay no matter what I did, but had no problem with any other site. Wouldn't you know those are the sites that I check several times per day too. [Mad]

I finally gave up at 3am and had no sleep before work. The next day I tried at work (I use their dial-up username and password to save money) and had the same problem on two of their computers. Finally I realized the problem must be with the isp since the only thing all 3 computers have in common is the isp. I called them and being the all knowing intelligent techies they are, they told me it was on my end. I told them they were crazy cause I tried 3 different computers on 3 different telephone lines and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it wasn't on my end! I went throughout the day trying repeatedly with no luck. By the time I got home at 5:30 I was starting major withdrawal! I called again and got the same "tech" who then told me that "Oh yeah we have found a problem in the Cleveland area that they are not sure what it is yet". NO FRICKIN KIDDDING! [Mad]

Anyhow by the time I got off the phone with her it worked again and I have had no problems since. We have Experien or something like that. Maybe that is your problem. Good Luck!
[Smile]

Josh

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 05-23-2004, 08:44 AM:

Too much spy software on your computer will cause it to drastically slow down when you're on the internet but it will run other applications just fine!!

Mark

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 05-23-2004, 10:52 AM:

I did try dialup via two different ISP's unrelated to DSL and connections to those sites were fine but when I went back to DSL they were fine there too so not sure if anything was proved. Fine now too.

Posted by Kyle McEachern (Member # 2250) on 05-23-2004, 02:55 PM:

As far as I can tell (Going off of the comments of someone who had the same issue), the Alter.net backbone (Owned by MCI, I believe), which is one of the major ones used to route traffic to a lot of places on the internet, was having some issues in the last couple of days that was blocking access to people whose connection paths went through them.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 05-23-2004, 09:21 PM:

One place to check the current health of the internet is this site:

Internet Traffic Report

You'll at least know if there are any problems globally that way. You can drill down and get some very specific data.

Posted by Mike Spaeth (Member # 524) on 05-24-2004, 12:55 AM:

We were having problems at the theatre Saturday night. Our credit card site kept going up and down ... sometimes we could obtain an authorization, sometimes not ... when I tested the frame-relay to see if it was working properly, some sites would load (expedia.com), but others would not (rentrak.com)